iPhone, Android Smartphone Use Jumps, BlackBerry Falls: Nielsen

Apple's iPhone and Android smartphones continue to see high adoption in the United States, according to Nielsen. On the flip side, RIM continues to see BlackBerry's share drop.

Apple's iPhone
and devices based on Google's Android operating system are running away in a
rapidly growing smartphone market that is now as large at the feature phone
space, according to numbers in the latest Nielsen Wire report.
And the iPhone's
growth appears to be coming at the expense of Research In Motion and its
BlackBerry portfolio, which is nearly tied with the "other" category
in the percentage of people who say they've bought a smartphone over the three
months leading up to the Nielsen survey.

Google's
Android OSwhich is used by a wide variety of device makers, from Samsung and
Motorola to HTC and LG Electronicsnow holds about 48 percent of the smartphone
market in the United States. Almost a third32.1 percentof smartphone owners
said they own an Apple iPhone, while BlackBerry accounted for 11.6 percent of
the smartphones on the U.S. market, according to Nielsen.

The numbers
changedsignificantly for Apple and RIMwhen Nielsen surveyed people who had
bought a smartphone in the previous three months. Forty-eight percent of those
people surveyed in February chose an Android-based device, keeping in line with
the Android numbers in the overall smartphone market.
However, 43
percent of new owners said they bought an iPhone, while 5 percent said they
chose a BlackBerry device.
The numbers
reflect what analysts and journalists heard March 29 during a conference call
with new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, who said that the BlackBerry maker needed to pull away a bit from the consumer market and
focus on its strength in the enterprise. Heins' comments were part of a larger
discussion about the need to restructure RIM in the wake of struggles over the
past couple of years, as Apple and Google-driven devices have eaten away at
BlackBerry's market share.
In the
previous fiscal quarter, RIM saw its bad news continue, seeing a 25 percent
drop in revenue over the same period last year and posting a $125 million loss.
The company shipped 11.1 million BlackBerry smartphones and more than 500,000
BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.
During the
conference call, Heins admitted that RIM under the previous regime was behind
on the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, with a
growing number of employees looking to use their personal smartphones and
tablets for work. He said RIM will refocus on its enterprise expertise and
address the consumer market in select areas, and mostly through partnerships.
"We
believe that BlackBerry cannot succeed if we try to be everybody's darling and
all things to all people," Heins said. "Therefore, we plan to build
on our strengths, to go after targeted consumer segments, and we will seek
strong partnerships to deliver those consumer features and content that are not
central to the BlackBerry [value] position, for example, media consumption
applications."
Smartphones
are rapidly growing in popularity, according to Nielsen's numbers. According to
the survey, 49.7 percent of all U.S. mobile subscribers now own smartphones, as
of February. That compares with 36 percent of subscribers in February 2011, a
38 percent increase year-over-year.
More than two-thirds
of those who bought a mobile phone in the three months leading up to the survey
bought a smartphone, Nielsen said.